Chapter Forty: A Vampire and Her Coven
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Hey, everybody!

This is it! The final chapter of Transfusion! Obviously, there are quite a few loose threads still in play after the end of the novel... so I guess it's a good thing that I have a sequel planned (though it will be a bit. If you're not already following me on SH, please do so you don't miss the announcement when I start publishing chapters to A Princess of Alfheim here. And please, please, please comment below! The more feedback I have about the sorts of things you want to read, the more I can cater my writing to your interests! And sometimes your keen insight helps me tweak the story to be better for everybody!

-Ovid

Chapter Forty: A Vampire and Her Coven

Vera wondered whether she should try her luck at turning Carmen. The slender familiar had indicated that she'd be amenable to becoming a vampire - while Lady Clandest had been notoriously stingy about turning familiars, the coven was in need of some new blood. And Vera was three for three with making successful vampires - Lisa, Maxie, and Eva had all successfully turned, though neither Maxie nor Gloria were quite sure where the younger witch had gone off to. Maybe back to Memphis and maybe not. Hector was broken up over it - for a day, at least. Then he disappeared the next evening without leaving so much as a goodbye message.

"Damn that boy!" Maxie cursed. "What do you want to bet it'll be another six months before I see him again?"

"Longer, I'd bet," Vera said. "At least if Eva makes him her familiar…"

Maxie frowned furiously, wincing as her fangs poked the insides of her lips - it took some getting used to facial expressions while in possession of razor-sharp fangs, but at least the little cuts and puncture-wounds healed quickly. "Her familiar… do you think she'd do that?"

Vera shrugged. "She might." To be honest, there wasn't a whole lot that she'd put past Eva.

Maxie harrumphed and clacked away at her beads. "Well… she'd better not."

No further elaboration on the threat was forthcoming. Instead, she sank into her new couch (well… it was an old couch, very 1970s with its plaid upholstery, but it was new to her), brow knit as she slurped blood out of her thermos. To the best of Vera's knowledge, Maxie had never bitten anybody. She refused to do so, and all of her thermoses had tomato stencils and V8 logos applied to their sides, as if she could convince herself that she was slurping down veggie blood instead of the real thing. But she always had a few days worth of blood stashed away, brought to her on the regular by any of Vera's many familiars. Unless she was blood-sated or close to it, Maxie couldn't practice witchcraft, but when she was blood-sated, her magic was as potent as ever, though she was still working at recapturing the finer details of channeling - vampire auras, it turned out, worked quite differently from human ones.

Gloria swept in from the garden, tromping the mud off her boots and wiping her hands on the fronts of her soil-streaked dungarees. She smiled when she saw Vera and scooted across the kitchen floor in her fuzzy socks to give Vera a hug.

"Well isn't this a pleasant surprise! Are you here for the cleansing?"

Vera wasn't even clear on what a cleansing was, so she just shrugged. "Just here to visit, but I'd love to see whatever it is. It's witchcraft?"

Gloria nodded. "Good fundamental witchcraft. If you're… you know… blood-drunk or whatever…"

"Blood-sated," Vera and Maxie said.

Gloria waved them off. "Right. The one where Maxie can channel like a fiend. If you're that, then I bet you can learn it in no time. How's your work with auras coming along?"

"It's coming," Vera said.

She wasn't sure whether it was a vampire thing or she was just a mediocre talent, but her skill at reading auras was taking its sweet time. She couldn't see them at all when she wasn't looking for them, not unless the aura was really in-your-face, but when she concentrated, they'd slowly resolve. It took her maybe a minute, whereas Gloria or Maxie would spot them pretty much effortlessly and instantaneously. Gloria's aura was like aquamarine with occasional motes of light - Maxie insisted that you could parse out the blue and the green and see many more glimmering spots, but it would take practice to resolve them. Maxie's aura was crimson with violet splashes and dark striations that Gloria said were patterned bands if you looked closely enough. And Vera's aura was very strong and complex, they said - though, of course, you could never see your own aura. That would be like trying to see your own eyeball (and, unlike eyeballs, auras couldn't be reflected in mirrors or recorded with cameras).

Vera pondered this as they crunched along the beach, a long tract of mostly-unkempt seashore with an occasional sandy atoll breaking up the scree and rocky hillside. There, they found an old alcove, abandoned for years though, at some point, it had been used as a shelter by at least a few people. Vera spotted the rusted-out remains of a wood stove, half-buried pots and pans, and a dozen pieces of driftwood that had probably once served as furniture. Maxie and Gloria lit their lanterns and got to the ritual, waving incense about, placing crystals about the place, using charcoal and chalk to inscribe symbols on the walls, and breaking into occasional chants. They encouraged Vera to participate, and she did as much as she could, scrawling symbols (usually incorrectly), waving the incense (a random pattern apparently worked as well as any), and repeating after Maxie syllable-by-syllable. Apparently, the ritual worked, because Gloria and Maxie stated that it had - and, Vera had to admit, the place felt cleaner and more welcoming afterward. She wondered whether she could do the same thing with the recently-emptied chapel to Abaddon out in the pine swamps and decided that she'd do just that.

When Vera brought the possibility up, Maxie pondered it, clacking at her beads. "That's a huge step, Vera. A proper cleansing takes three - two just won't cut it if it's got seriously bad vibes like I'm sure that place does. And… well… no offense, but you're just learning… I'll give you some books to study. Beyond that, we might want to find something intermediate to practice on."

"Chapel House?" Vera said.

Gloria clattered up to them, their ritual supplies all stuffed into her canvas backpack. "What's Chapel House?" she asked.

+++++

Chapel House was the (former) estate of (former) Master Vampire Erasmus Moody. As far as anybody knew, he was still alive, but nobody could say exactly where he'd zoomed off in his Rolls Royce. He'd been at the epicenter of the blast when Lisa activated Gloria's special amulet, so maybe he'd been badly injured - but vampires could and eventually did recover from all but the most grievous injuries. If a vampire wasn't dead, full stop, they could safely be assumed to be undead. Wondering what Erasmus Moody had gotten up to kept Vera on her toes and she had to hope her substantial network of familiars was savvy enough to give her early warning.

Moody was gone and chapel house was largely deserted. Moody hadn't told anybody to look after the place and, in the absence of their master, many of the familiars, slaves in all but name, had wandered off. Vera would later round up as many as she could find and give them the same offer she gave every familiar bound to a dead or missing vampire: swear loyalty to her and become familiar to her or one of the half-dozen other vampires she pretty much trusted (that list included Maxie and Lisa, of course, though Maxie was dead-set against accepting any familiars). Or they could go about their lives, soon losing the slowed aging and supernatural vigor that a regular dosing of Juvechrome C (crimson venom) could offer. But when Vera arrived at Chapel House with Maxie and Gloria, there were no familiars to be seen and nobody had done a whit of maintenance on the place in weeks. Most of it was still in pretty decent shape, since there also hadn't been anybody to despoil the place, either.

They arrived in early evening - the sun fried vampires but, realistically, anything before 8 am and after 5 pm was tolerable for a reasonably powerful vampire, and when blood-sated, Vera didn't even need sunscreen. They parked Maxie's Buick along the big roundabout out front and crunched along a white limestone path in need of minor maintenance. The big white-columned edifice of the plantation house loomed before them.

"This place always gives me the creeps," Vera said. Even without familiars acting the parts of Old South slaves and servantry, Chapel House sent a shiver down her spine. It was a shame the place was so beautiful or she'd have ordered it burnt to the ground.

"Your witching instincts are true, though you've got to hone them," Gloria said. "This place is giving off some seriously bad vibes. This may be too much for us to handle."

Anywhere where bad things had happened over time would pick up a bad character - enough of it and even people who weren't magically attuned would pick up on it. When those bad things were also incredibly evil and magical in nature, the place creeped out faster and worse. When Vera walked into the former chapel of Abaddon, for instance, it was like being slapped in the face with a hot towel of funky demon essence. Nowhere in Chapel House felt like that, but it did have an awful lot of places where Erasmus Moody had been up to no good for centuries. It might take a month for the three of them to cleanse the whole mansion.

"We'll do one room at a time," Maxie stated. "Some are bound to be easier than others - we can start small and work our way up."

Gloria leaned across Vera to peck Maxie's cheek. "You've always been the more pragmatic between us. What do you suggest?"

"We'll split up and scope out the place and…"

"No," Vera said with an insistence that surprised her. "No… I mean think about it. What if Moody's still here, hiding somewhere? He's a powerful vampire, very cunning, and he's guaranteed to fight dirty. You two have to stay together… preferably with me nearby."

"Fine - we scope the place out together," Maxie said. "We'll list all the rooms that need cleansing and start with the easiest one. Okay?"

"It's a plan."

They paced about the place - the entrance, the parlor, the upstairs bedrooms, the wine cellar. They found about five places of intermediate creep… practically the whole place was at least a bit creepy… but nothing truly stood out. Things notched up a bit when they entered the 'secret' area with all of Moody's family heirlooms, some of which were missing. Apparently, he'd managed to pop back in to claim a few especially sentimental objects before making himself scarce. As they traipsed down the hallway, Gloria's footsteps tapping against the marble floor but Vera's and Maxie's footfalls making hardly any sound, Vera heard shuffling in the hidden room. She signaled for the two witches to wait.

"Do you think it's this Moody bastard?" Maxie asked.

Vera shrugged. "It might be. Wait here."

She half-expected either of the witches to object, but neither of them did. If Vera needed help, she supposed, Maxie would be able to hear it with her keen vampire ears. So she crept down to the far end of the mansion's eastern annex and slowly opened the door, which was already cracked open, to Erasmus Moody's big collection of genuine retro clothing. Somebody was shuffling through the racks of clothes and had already packed two large luggage cases close to overfilling.

"Lisa?" Vera asked.

"Vera?" Lisa peeked over a clothes rack and skittered up to her. She motioned like she wanted to initiate a hug, hesitated, stepped an inch to the side, and then she and Vera did, in fact, share an awkward hug. "Um… hi?"

"I'm here with Maxie and Gloria," Vera said. "We're going to do a cleansing on the house… or part of it, anyway. You're, uh… it looks like you're taking all the best clothes?"

"Oh!" Lisa looked back to the jam-packed luggage cases. "Yeah. If you think you might like some, I guess we can go through and do alternating choices?"

Vera didn't mention that everything in Chapel House was now the property of the Clandest Institute. She had very good lawyers now and had managed to take control of the estates of most of the dead (or, in Moody's case, absconded) vampires. She'd distributed most of that property to other vampires in the coven - whichever ones she thought were teetering between acceptance and rebellion but might be swayed by real estate and antiques. But she'd kept Chapel House in the institute's name and was still pondering what to do with it. All of the clothes in the wardrobe, which was the size of a basketball half-court, technically belonged to Vera. But the twinge of possessiveness that sprang within her was so weak, she quickly snuffed the urge to be snarky. "No, take whatever you like. I've got a wardrobe person in the city."

"Oh?" Lisa bit her lip adorably. Vera almost kissed her. "You'll have to introduce me sometime. Um… so…" her face lit up in a thousand-watt smile. "So… what's a cleansing?"

Vera shrugged. "A witch thing. It's supposed to get rid of the creepy crawlies in the place."

"Can I help?"

+++++

Lisa couldn't really help. Vera could barely help and she'd already helped with one cleansing before and read half of a book on the topic. Lisa would have gotten in the way. So she watched them cleanse the entryway, which was a natural starting spot since the whole house was about evenly creepy, save for one particularly chilling spot in the basement and the hallway of Moody family relics, which had some serious creep. They set their candles, scribbled their symbols, burned their incense, set their crystals, and did their chant - forty-five minutes from start to finish. Then Lisa's phone buzzed and she announced that her ride was waiting out front.

She scampered up to Vera, decked out in a snug tiger-stripe minidress with '80s-tastic shoulder pads and dangly golden earrings, her perfume wafting before her. Whenever Vera saw Lisa, took in her beauty, her cute little mannerisms, the way she'd weaponized her facial expressions to influence Vera's heart, it was all she could do not to leap into her arms. But she didn't. Lisa leaned in, Vera turned her head, and they kissed one another on the cheeks like proper Southern socialites.

"I miss us," Lisa whispered.

"Me, too," Vera said. "But there can't be an us. Not now."

"I'm…" Lisa's pouty lower lip trembled ever so slightly. "I'm sorry. I'm not a bad person, you know. I'm really trying… When I really do mindfulness, I think I can feel the link between me and Abaddon fading and… and I hope you can love me again."

Vera teared up. Lisa teared up. Maxie, who'd heard them with her vampire hearing, sniffled somewhere behind them. "It's not about love, Lisa. It's about what's best for both of us. Maybe that will change… we've got a long time to figure it out, right?"

Lisa smiled weakly. She ran her fingers down the side of Vera's face. "Right," she said. Then her phone buzzed again. "Crap. I have to go. I don't have a driver yet, so I kinda got Armand to drive me in his Galvani." Unexpectedly, she pecked Vera on the lips. "See you, Vera."

"Um… see you," Vera sighed. "Wait… who's Armand? Lisa, who's Armand?" She shouted after her, but Lisa was already gone, zipping down the plantation road in a luxury electric car with Armand, whoever the hell that was.

Who knew that even a vampire heart could mourn lost love? Vera sighed and turned back to Gloria and Maxie, both of whom were wearing their best pained-yet-supportive expressions. "I'll… why don't you go set up to cleanse another room? I'll be with you in a few."

She padded upstairs, the mansion seeming incrementally less creepy than before. Vera continued down the upstairs hallway, the satiny carpet soft underfoot, and she soon found herself in the bedroom that she and Lisa had once shared while in quasi-captivity in the mansion. She could still smell Lisa's perfume lingering, her brief stay in the room infusing the place with her presence long after she'd gone, just like she'd infused Vera's heart. Vera wondered whether she'd ever get over it… or whether she even ought to get over it, whether she could allow herself to be happy in what should have been a wonderful new life. She felt the tears rolling down her cheeks, but her emotions were so confused that she couldn't have told you why she was crying beyond that, with everything she had now, she still felt like she'd left too many pieces of her heart behind.

Vera paced to the end of the room, threw open the curtains, and sat herself on the bed, Lisa's scent puffing up all around her. She watched the sun set over the distant pine swamps, and she wondered whether it was a blessing or a curse that she couldn't just leave her humanity behind. Then she wiped her eyes, let out a long breath, and headed back downstairs to be with her coven.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Thanks for reading, and make sure you follow me here to catch my latest releases! Transfusion is done for now, but I've got many more stories to tell (including, if there's enough popular demand, a sequel to this story). Next up on Scribble Hub will be my fantasy isekai adventure, A Princess of Alfheim. If you liked Transfusion, don't forget to check out my many other stories Scribble Hub, Patreon, or Amazon (free with Kindle Unlimited)!

https://www.patreon.com/OvidLemma
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